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How To Do To Microsoft What Microsoft Did To You (think Office for free)

Besides taking your money every couple of years, what exactly has Microsoft done for you lately? Other than complicate your life with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and an endless stream of features that are seldom used.

Screw that. It’s time to do a little to Microsoft what the Windows maker has done to everyone for many years. Instead of buying Microsoft Office and not using all the functions, install the LibreOffice app suite on your Mac, get Office compatibility with Windows users, and keep the money. LibreOffice is free.

Microsoft Office is the de facto standard of business apps– Word, PowerPoint, Excel. It’s how business works. And it’s how business pays to keep Microsoft so wealthy.

On the other hand, LibreOffice is a free open source Office replacement app that runs on Mac and Windows. The built-in modules perform very much like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but the suite comes with a drawing app, a database app, and more templates than there are Red States.

The Word replacement is called Writer. Guess what it looks like?

Writer comes with all the standard word processing features and tools you’ve learned to use and hate. You’ll still not enjoy the complexity but at least the price is right.

Calc is the Excel-like spreadsheet in LibreOffice. Guess what it looks like?

Calc looks and works like Excel for a reason. That makes it as easy to use and as functional as Excel for the rest of us, but at an affordable price.

You see where this is going, right?

LibreOffice has a PowerPoint-like module in Impress, a presentation tool that is instantly familiar to anyone who’s used PowerPoint to create a slide show for training, business proposals, etc. There’s a Notes module, an Outliner, and a Slider Sorter.

LibreOffice can be a valuable addition to any office or home that once depended upon Microsoft Office. Draw is the LibreOffice drawing app. Base is the database app. The LibreOffice Template center gives you access to dozens of business templates in many languages so you can be up and running quickly and completely Office free.

For the most part, documents created by Microsoft Office can be opened in LibreOffice with similar functionality. Tools are laid out and arranged to give an Office user plenty of familiarity, so the learning curve is modest.

Most of us like an opportunity to ‘stick it to the man‘ and LibreOffice gives you a chance to break free from Microsoft’s notorious licensing fees with the least amount of pain.